What I don't get about Slack or any other 'chat as a service' system is why tech companies would willingly backdoor themselves with a surveillance system to harvest all their most private in-house discussions.
All those chat logs must be worth quite a bit to the right buyers.
but seriously, somewhere between 2000 and 2019 the IT industry seamlessly transitioned from
"we provide precision engineering tools, your data is yours, you should not need to trust us or anyone, mathematics is your guarantee, crypto 4 ever. "
to
"give us your data. all of it. give. no secrets. hold nothing back. in return we will... train AIs on it.. and provide unspecified 'services'... for someone, who may be you... that can change at any time... and we are funded by, uh. Look, a unicorn!"
I'm so old I remember when the entire tech industry FREAKED THE HECK OUT at the idea of 'Total Information Awareness' and now it's just 'yeah, that's literally our business plan, what's wrong with it'
@natecull most people don’t remember room 641A either
@natecull The problem was that literally the only reason they were freaking out was because it was the government talking about doing it. They never had any problem with private industry doing it for private ends.
@freakazoid @natecull Personally, I'd prefer for the government doing it. There I have, at least in theory, a vote.
@freakazoid @natecull Also they had a scary logo!
@natecull Totalitarian Information Awareness.
@natecull Yeah, but like… when the government does surveillance they hoard the data for themselves and that’s just like SOVIET RUSSIA and BAD but when private companies do it they sell it and that’s CAPITALISM and GOOD!
@natecull Turns out the reason they freaked the heck out was the government was keeping them out of the loop. They wanted to do it for high margins. The government was proposing cutting them out of the gravy train.
@natecull Hmm. Having Admiral Poindexter, who was somehow involved in the Iran-Contra mess, introduce Total Information Awareness under W made it seem rather less warm & cuddly than an Alexa ad perhaps
Of course 16 years have elapsed since TIA was first proposed and in tech, I guess that's an eternity; an entire generation have probably retired and the new kids don't even know who George W Bush was, the even newer ones probably don't even know about Edward Snowden, the really new ones haven't heard of Donald Trump